The politics of subsidies and freebies is something we are all too familiar with. Not just because of its pervasiveness but also because of the electoral success it reaps. But we would be failing in our duty if we didn’t remind those invested in India’s future of the consequences of opting for short-term gains at the cost of, well, the future beyond tomorrow.

The government of Telangana promises farmers free power, round the clock, declaring itself to be the first state to do so. The honour of being the first to give free power 24×7 might be Telangana’s but that for destroying perfectly healthy state electricity boards via runaway power subsidies has been taken, time and again.

Punjab’s fisc is broken and Tamil Nadu’s power distribution system, once one of the finest in the country, became one of the worst, thanks to free power for farmers.

Farmers need remunerative prices, investment in infrastructure and freedom from crippling regulation, not free inputs. Free power and subsidised urea have led to indiscriminate depletion of groundwater, increasing salinity and infertility of the soil, besides crop patterns at odds with the logic of India’s agroclimatic zones.

Sugarcane, for example, should grow in the fertile Indo-Gangetic basin, and not at all on the hardscrabble lands of the Deccan, where subsidy alone drives farmers to plant cane. Since ‘free’ translates, more often than not, into unmetered connections, many a small-time industrialist draws the power he needs right off a farm connection, and pays neither the cost of energy, nor taxes.

India’s power sector is crippled by 30% of the power generated not being paid for. Telangana’s policy only adds to this process of slow murder by subsidy.

The primary requirement of prosperity in the farm sector is good connectivity, both road and telecom, so as to identify the markets that offer the best price and move one’s produce there. Storage and proximate value addition via processing come next. Trade policy that minimises distortion of price signals is another. Free does not quite cut it. Telangana can do better.